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Biomes

A biome is a region in a world with distinct geographic features. A World can contain mutliple Biomes.

Examples of biomes are:

  • Meadows
  • Woodland
  • Tundra
  • Desert

A Biome specifies what sub-biomes and species spawn within its area. Area where a biome spawns is hand painted.

Painting Biomes​

Select Biomes tool from the toolbar and then select the Biome you want to paint with in the dropdown list. After that you can paint that Biome over the landscape.

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The visualization color of each Biome can be modified in the biome asset (Debug Color property).

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Sub-biomes​

Sub-biomes are smaller biomes inside the hand-painted biomes. The key difference between biomes and sub-biomes is that sub-biomes have a mask/material which allows for defining their placement procedurally.

As an example, you may have a "Mountains" biome with several sub-biomes:

  • Mountain Forest
  • Mountain Woodland
  • Mountain Grassland

Sub-biomes may be shared between Biomes. Ex: "Grassland" sub-biome could be used in "Tundra" and "Moderate" biomes. where each of these sub-biomes can share or completely replace spawned species.

You usually want to place your species in sub-biomes.

Placing species in Biomes asset is handy for quick tests and throwaway maps. Sub-Biomes provide control which becomes important for setups with more than a few species.

Sub-biome placement​

Sub-biomes may be placed procedurally (based on many inputs, such as hand-painted masks, textures, landscape weightmaps, etc).

Each sub-biome has a generation Material Mask that outputs a value telling how much that Sub-biome wants to spawn at a given location. The Mask Material may for example contain procedural noise that outputs zeros in certain regions and positive numbers in other regions.

If the Sub-biome outputs the highest value of all Sub-biomes at a given location, it will spawn. Otherwise, it won't. One exception to that rule is when multiple Sub-biomes output exactly the same value. In that case they will all spawn.

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Sub-biomes outputting negative values​

There are two modes to choose from for how to handle values returned from the sub-biome generation material mask.

  1. Highest Non-Zero Value

    In which only Sub-Biomes that output a positive value can spawn. If all the Sub-Biomes output negative value or zero in an area, nothing will be spawned there.

  2. Highest Value

    Where Sub-Biome with the highest value will spawn even if that value is 0 or a negative number. This settings is useful if you want to make sure that all the regions are covered with the generated content. In order to create empty space with this setting you need to add an empty Sub-Biome (without any Species) and make it output a constant, low value (ex: 0.1) in its Mask. This way it can "win" over Sub-Biomes that output values lower than the Empty Sub-Biome.

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